Thomas Palmeri, Ph.D.

Centennial Chair

Professor of Psychology

Professor of Computer Science

Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences

Department Chair of Psychology

thomas.j.palmeri AT vanderbilt.edu

tel: 615-343-7900

fax: 615-343-8449

I received my BS in cognitive science from Carnegie Mellon in 1987, my Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Indiana University in 1995, and then began my faculty position at Vanderbilt. I currently hold the Centennial Chair and am a Professor of Psychology, Computer Science, and Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. I serve as Chair of the Department of Psychology and head the CatLab. My ORCID ID is 0000-0001-7617-9797.

I have previously served as Director of Graduate Studies three times, Director of Undergraduate Research for the Data Science Institute at Vanderbilt, Associate Director of the former Learning Sciences Institute at Vanderbilt, co-Director of Scientific Computing, and Director of the Data Science Minor. I have been heavily involved in many efforts related to computation and data science over the years: I am on the Steering Committee for the AI Grand Challenge in A&S, chaired the A&S Working Group on Computational Thinking, co-led the effort to create the Scientific Computing Minor, led the effort to create the Data Science Minor, was part of the leadership team that proposed the Data Science Institute and the Data Science Masters program; I was Computer Module Director for the VVRC, have been an active user of ACCRE for over two decades, was co-PI on the first GPU instrumentation grant for the ACCRE cluster, and previously served on the Faculty Advisor Board for ACCRE. I also co-chaired the Faculty Senate Task Force on Administrative Effectiveness.

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Jason Chow, Ph.D.

vanderbilt AT jasonc.how

Jason began as a graduate student at Vanderbilt in Fall 2018. He is from Canada. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, he worked with CatLab alumnus, and now University of Toronto faculty member, Michael Mack on the development and validation of a printable 3D stimulus set for categorization experiments in visual and tactile modalities. As a graduate student at Vanderbilt, Jason combined computational cognitive modeling, deep learning modeling, neuroimaging, and psychometrics to understand individual differences in high-level visual cognition. After completing his PhD, Jason is on his way to Meta for a new job as a research engineer.

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Jinhyeok Jeong

jinhyeok.jeong AT vanderbilt.edu>

Jinhyeok received his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Master’s degree in Cognitive Science at Yonsei University where, under the supervision of Professor Sang Chul Chong, he studied ensemble perception, especially the variability perception of multiple visual items. As a graduate student at Vanderbilt, he is interested in the computational mechanisms of ensemble perception and how it relates to object categorization. Jinhyeok also has great interests in cognitive models of perception, memory, and decision-making processes, and how deep neural networks can be combined with these models.

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Yinuo Peng

yinuo.peng AT vanderbilt.edu

Yinuo received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Master’s degree in Psychological Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where, under the supervision of Dr. Frances Wang and Dr. Simona Buetti, she studied time and space perception, visual search, and object learning in humans and deep neural networks. As a graduate student at Vanderbilt, Yinuo is interested in exploring the mechanisms of object perception, recognition, and representation using computational and deep learning techniques.

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Giwon Bahg, Ph.D.

giwon.bahg AT vanderbilt.edu

Giwon received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Brandon Turner, where he studied how category learning interacts with attention, information search, and other higher-order cognitive processes. His particular interest lies in understanding how such processes evolve over time in a closed-loop, interactive environment. His research also involves joint modeling of multimodal data using computational cognitive modeling, Bayesian methods, and machine learning approaches.

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Simon Lilburn, Ph.D.

simon.lilburn AT vanderbilt.edu

Simon comes from the land of sunny beaches, large marsupials, and disgustingly salty spreads which Australians pretend to like to fool foreigners. He received his Ph.D degree from the University of Melbourne investigating the dynamics of visual short-term memory in the Vision and Attention Lab under the supervision of Prof. Philip Smith and Dr David Sewell. His work has used a blend of traditional psychophysical experimentation with computational models of memory and decision-making to understand some of the fundamental limits on perception. His research centers on coupling intensive and individualized experiments with formal theories of basic cognitive processes with a particular emphasis on the link between perception (what we see, hear, feel) and action (what we do).

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Amirsaman Sajad, Ph.D.

amirsaman.sajad AT vanderbilt.edu

Amir did his PhD in Toronto and did his postdoctoral work in primate neurophysiology at Vanderbilt. His recent work has focused on dissecting the neural circuitry serving performance monitoring and adaptive behavior, and on linking this to non-invasive electrophysiological biomarkers. He joined the lab as a Research Assistant Professor to extend his computational expertise and integrate decision-making modeling with models of performance monitoring and cognitive control. His scientific mission is to discover the building blocks of cognition and their biomarkers and translate this knowledge to real-world applications.

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David Brust (Undergraduate Researcher)

david.m.brust AT vanderbilt.edu

David Brust is an undergraduate researcher majoring in neuroscience and German. He is interested in using computational models to better understand the brain and intends to use what he learns to pursue a PhD in neuroscience.

Jeff Annis, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Data Scientist in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center

jeff.annis AT vanderbilt.edu

Jeff was interested in the mechanisms and representations involved in memory and categorization. He received his Ph.D. from the University of South Florida in 2014 where he studied the relationship between memory and perception via sequential dependencies. Jeff used computational models, Bayesian hierarchical methods, and empirical investigations to understand the dynamics of perceptual expertise and visual memory. Other current work interfaces deep learning, convolutional neural network models of vision with cognitive models of perception, memory, and decision making.

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Leanne Boucher, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Associate Professor of Psychology at Nova Southeastern University

Leanne received her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College in 1992 under the mentorship of Howard Hughes. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt with Jeff Schall, Tom Palmeri, and Gordon Logan. We published a paper in Psychological Review that described a stochastic model of saccade countermanding that accounts for details of both behavior and neurophysiology. Her other work used behavioral experiments and modeling to examine trial-by-trial adjustments in behavior in the countermanding task, the effects of eye and hand responses in countermanding, and the relationships between working memory, attention, and eye movements. Her postdoctoral fellowship was supported by an individual NRSA from the NIH.

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Greg Cox, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University at Albany

gregcox7 AT gmail.com

After discovering he was not cut out for the life of a musician, Greg turned toward the more lucrative profession of Cognitive Science. Greg got his Ph.D. amid the cornfields of Indiana and served in the ice palaces of Syracuse before joining the team in sunny Vanderbilt. His work involves the development of experimental techniques and mathematical/computational models that help us understand how neural and cognitive processes jointly unfold across time. Such processes range from very brief (fractions of a second, like making rapid decisions based on perceptual information) to moderate duration (a few seconds, like retrieving information from memory) to the long term (hours to years, like learning). Greg began a faculty position at SUNY Albany in Fall 2020.

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Stephen Denton, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Senior Manager, Data Science & Model Innovation Senior Manager at Scotiabank

Stephen was a member of the lab 2011-2012. He now lives in Toronto. At Indiana, as a graduate student with John Kruschke and postdoctoral fellow with Rich Shiffrin and Rob Nosofsky, his research interests encompassed a broad range of cognitive science topics with a predominant concentration being on mathematical models of learning and categorization. He studied and modeled shifts of attention in associative learning. He explored and modeled how humans select information to learn about, in associative learning tasks (i.e., how people actively learn). He investigated how multiple types of mental representations (e.g., rules and exemplars) can be flexibly applied in human category learning and in models thereof. And he explored and modeled the inference process by which people form percepts of the visual world using a short-term priming paradigm. At Vanderbilt, he conducted behavioral and modeling research on face recognition and real world perceptual expertise.

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Suzie Dukic (Former PEN Coordinator)

now Core Faculty, Training Coordinator, Adler University, Chicago

Suzie worked as the PEN coordinator for several great years. After completing her Master’s degree in Counseling at Lipscomb and working as a researcher in David Zald’s laboratory, she earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Counseling at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville.

Jonathan Folstein, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Senior Human Factors Engineer at Sonalysts

jonathan.r.folstein AT gmail.com

Jonathan received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona under the mentorship of Cyma Van Petten. He is interested in the neural basis of semantic memory and object categorization. For his dissertation, he employed event related potentials to investigate perceptual classification. At Vanderbilt, he conducted behavioral and fMRI research on category learning and its impact on object representations. After several years as a faculty member at Florida State University, he moved to industry, where he is now at Sonalysts.

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Claire Hanson (former Undergraduate Honors Student)

now MD-PhD student at Vanderbilt University

claire.i.hanson AT vanderbilt.edu

Claire completed her undergraduate honors thesis in neuroscience, earning high honors. She came to Vanderbilt from rural Minnesota, majoring in neuroscience and minoring in scientific computing and French. Outside of academics, Claire was involved in Vanderbilt Student Volunteers for Science, Alternative Spring Break, and worked as a writing consultant at the Writing Studio. For her, computational modeling was a way to merge her two academic passions: neuroscience and mathematics. Her honors project was a project comparing different models of neural dynamics in FEF. After completing a two-year NIH postbacc, she is now an MD-PhD student at Vanderbilt.

Michael Mack, Ph.D. (Former Graduate Student)

now Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto

mack.michael AT gmail.com

Mike received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt in 2011 and then gained postdoctoral experience at UT Austin with Brad Love and Allison Preston. His research at Vanderbilt examined the cognitive mechanisms involved in visual object recognition and categorization, examined how different computational models of categorization can account for the time course of categorization, and collaborated with Jenn Richler on the role of perceptual and decisional influences of holistic processing in face perception. At UT Austin, he combined cognitive modeling and fMRI to understand the representations and processes underlying categorization and memory. He begins as a new faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto in Fall 2016.

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Brent Miller, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

bymiller AT gmail.com

Brent came from a background in computer engineering, and was interested in how the mechanisms of information storage, retrieval and encoding affect judgment and decision making. Previously, he used computational modeling to show how certain decision behavior necessarily arises from probabilistic information representation in the brain. By using modeling to describe behavioral and neurological data, he pursued these questions further into the biological substrate. In his fellowship, Brent explored ensemble models of decision making. Brent came from the University of California, Irvine, where he received his Ph.D. in 2014.

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Lance Pearson, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

Former Director of Applied Analytics for the Philadelphia 76ers

Lance received his PhD from Boston University and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Logan, Palmeri, and Schall developing computational models of saccade decision making. After Vanderbilt, he was on the faculty in a small college in Kentucky, where in addition to teaching courses in psychology, he was an assistant coach for the college basketball team. He later moved to an analytics position with the Philadelphia 76ers, where he rose to become the Director of Applied Analytics. He moved on from the 76ers after a change in team management.

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Braden Purcell, Ph.D. (Former Graduate Student)

now Data Scientist at Squarespace

braden.a.purcell AT vanderbilt.edu

Braden developed computational cognitive neuroscience models of visual section and perceptual decision making that accounted for behavior and single unit neural activity. He continued his training in neurophysiology and computational neuroscience in a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU with Roozbeh Kiani. Braden recently began work as a Data Scientist at Squarespace in New York City.

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Jennifer Richler, Ph.D. (Former Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Senior Editor at Nature Publishing

jenn.richler AT vanderbilt.edu

As a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, Jenn was broadly interested in the cognitive mechanisms involved in visual object recognition, memory, and categorization and how these processes are modulated by experience and expertise. She recently began a new career as Senior Editor at Nature Publishing. In this new position, she be covering psychology and social sciences for interdisciplinary Nature titles including Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, and Nature Nanotechnology among others; the job covers all aspects of the editorial process, including manuscript selection, commissioning and editing of Reviews and News & Views, and writing for the journals.

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David Ross, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Postdoctoral Fellow at UMass

davidross AT umass.edu

David was broadly interested in the mechanisms underlying visual object perception in the brain. Specifically, he was interested in the processes underling human face recognition. Some of his work used computational modelling and psychophysical investigation to explore high-level adaptation aftereffects and their implications for norm and exemplar accounts of face recognition. David was a visiting graduate student at Vanderbilt in the spring 2010 and he started as a postdoctoral fellow with Gauthier and Palmeri in 2011. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts.

web page | research gate | academic family tree

Craig Sanders, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Research Engineer (Human Perception) at Meta

craig.a.sanders AT vanderbilt.edu

In his research, Craig was interested in combining machine learning (especially deep learning) with classic cognitive models to understand how people perceive, categorize, and mentally represent objects. Craig received his B.S. in Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2013, and received his Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Science from Indiana University in the Summer 2018. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Palmeri and Gauthier using a combination of deep learning models and cognitive models to explain individual differences in visual cognition. He left his fellowship after a year for a data science position in industry.

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Mathieu Servant, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté

servant.mathieu AT gmail.com

Mathieu has a background in cognitive neuroscience and is interested in the computational and neural basis of perceptual decision-making. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Marseille (France) where he studied the links between decision-making and cognitive control using computational models and electrophysiology. At Vanderbilt, Mathieu pursued his research in collaboration with Palmeri, Jeff Schall, Gordon Logan, and Geoff Woodman.

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Jianhong (May) Shen, Ph.D. (Former Graduate Student)

now Data Scientist at Meta

jianhong.shenvandy AT gmail.com

May was an undergraduate at Peking University, where she worked with Professor Fang Fang. Her research in graduate school focused primarily on developing and testing computational models of expert visual categorization. Her work combined stochastic accumulator modeling, Bayesian Hierarchical modeling, and psychometric methods.

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Magen Speegle (former Research Analyst and PEN-MMM Coordinator)

magen.a.speegle AT vanderbilt.edu

Magen received her bachelor’s degree in psychology at University of Alabama in Birmingham. Magen was for several years Coordinator for the Perceptual Expertise Network.

Gabriel Tillman, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Lecturer at Australian College of Applied Psychology, Sydney, Australia

gabrieltillman.au AT gmail.com

Gabriel is interested in how people make simple perceptual decisions about incoming sensory information. During his Ph.D., he used mathematical models to learn about the mental processes involved in speech perception, word recognition, and driving motor vehicles under increased cognitive load. At Vanderbilt, Gabriel worked with Palmeri, Schall, and Logan in developing neurocognitive models of perceptual decision-making.

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Akash Umakantha (Former Undergraduate Researcher)

now Data Scientist at Fidelity Investments

Akash was a member of the Vanderbilt Class of 2015 with majors in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering. He graduated as the winner of the Founder’s Medal from the School of Engineering, the most prestigious award Vanderbilt gives to its students. He worked in the CatLab from the summer after his first year as a Vanderbilt Research Fellow; one summer he attended the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory summer course. He worked on a project linking spiking neural network models and stochastic accumulator models of decision making. He is broadly interested in scientific computing and building computational neuroscience models. Akash received his PhD in Neural Computation and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University.

Tim Vickery, Ph.D. (Former Research Assistant)

now Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Delaware

Tim worked in the lab as an undergraduate and as a research assistant. He recently completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the lab of Yuhong Jiang doing research on attention and decision making. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.

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Alan C.-N. Wong, Ph.D. (Former Graduate Student)

now Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey

alan.wong AT surrey.ac.uk

Alan studied visual expertise in letter perception and subordinate-level object perception under the supervision of Isabel Gauthier and Tom Palmeri. His research training combined psychophysics, fMRI, ERP, and computational modeling. His primary interest has been on recovering the general principles in perceptual learning and in the organization of our visual object perception system. After several years on the faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he is now on the faculty at the University of Surrey.

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Bram Zandbelt, Ph.D. (Former Postdoctoral Fellow)

now Data Scientist at Nederlandse Spoorwegen

bramzandbelt AT gmail.com

Bram earned his Ph.D. from Utrecht University where he investigated the neural mechanisms of proactive and reactive inhibition in healthy human subjects and patients with schizophrenia. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Jeff Schall, Gordon Logan, and Thomas Palmeri on computational models of response time and executive control. He was broadly interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying executive control of actions, with an emphasis on mechanisms involved in response inhibition. To address these issues, he used versions of the stop-signal task and employs diverse techniques, including brain imaging, brain stimulation, and computational modeling. After his fellowship at Vanderbilt, Bram moved to the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour in The Netherlands. He is now working as a data scientist in industry.

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